Our Founding Fathers were not all professional politicians. They were farmers, writers, inventors, lawyers and surveyors. They had organized estates, led men into battle, built furniture, and written books.
By contrast, our modern elite have often never generated anything. I believe that is why they find it so easy to destroy things that they don't understand (which is a long list).
Petty officials in Brussels attack the British banger and English chocolate, not by relevant measures such as taste or safety, but using purely arbitrary scales.
In Britain, the well-educated New Labour, demonstrating their reverse snobbery, diminish the Peerage, and complete the destruction of a once-great educational system.
In the US, we have the legions of draft-dodgers who steer high-ticket military contracts to their friends, while our exhausted troops salvage from junk yards. The managers, accountants and lawyers have brought our economy to its elbows by equating the movement of wealth with its generation. Our fragile education system is battered by consultants and administrators who confuse good grades with competent teaching and actual learning.
Perhaps some of this could be improved by adapting some of the Japanese model, where management trainees first must try every job on the shop floor?
7 comments:
Excellent point about our multi-skilled and experienced forefathers, P.
Absolutely, I am of the opinion that no person should be able to be a politician before the age of 40, and must have had paid employment in a private business for at least 10 years before that.
No more career politicians who flit from university to think tank, to political advisor, to local govt council (on expenses natch) to safe parliamentary seat.
This is in no way discriminatory to the left - all the old Labour politicians were working men - dockers, train drivers, miners, factory workers. Modern politicians of both hues have no life experience of work and industry from either side of the labour/capital divide.
Politics should be something that you do after you have had a career of sorts, and raised a family. A way of putting something back into society. Not a career in its own right.
Agree with the overall sentiment but not clear what the problem is with diminishing the peerage. The faster they diminish, the better.
Anon - they want to diminish the peerage just because they don't like it, which is no good reason. There are arguments to be made on both sides - stability versus the entrenched powers, for example.
"all the old Labour politicians were working men": yeah, good old Attlee. Or Wilson. Or.....
dearieme is right. Tony Benn in that list along with Denis Healey (in fact you could write a long list).
Government will always be Government. A waste of societies resources. We just need to keep it as small as possible.
Denis Healey served in the forces in WWII, fighting in the Italian campaign, and at the Anzio landings, winning the Military Cross. I think he was qualified to serve as an MP.
Clement Atlee served in WWI at Gallipoli, and was one of the last men to be evacuated. He was wounded in Iraq, and served on the Western Front for the last few months of the war. I think that qualifies him to serve as an MP as well.
I'm sure there are lots of old Labour MPs who wheren't hands-on working men, but my point was that if you had to have work experience before becoming an MP, it would neccessarily discriminate against people from the Left.
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